When a worker in the UK is unfairly dismissed or denied equal pay, the legal remedy they receive depends less on the violation itself and more on which country’s courts hear the case. This project examines why remedies for the same labour rights—employment status, equality, wages, dismissal, and industrial action—vary so dramatically across France, Greece, Poland, Sweden, and the UK. Current comparative labour law treats remedies as a narrow technical question. CURE reframes them as a legally structured mechanism that sits between politics and economics, shaping what counts as effective redress in capitalist societies. The gap is that no one has systematically mapped how legal, political, and economic forces together produce these differences. If successful, the project will produce an interpretative map that shows how remedies calibrate the real-world effectiveness of labour law. This could directly inform policy-making and regulatory reform across Europe—not by prescribing one solution, but by revealing why existing frameworks deliver such uneven outcomes for workers with identical violations. The research is fundamental in nature, aimed at rethinking a core legal concept rather than delivering immediate practical tools, but its findings could reshape how governments evaluate and design labour protections.
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CURE sets a new intellectual agenda and direction in comparative labour law by examining in a multi-disciplinary way a crucial but neglected issue of contemporary relevance, that is the concept of remedies. The project promotes a provocative rethinking of remedies by going beyond treating remedies as a technical exercise connected to principles of legal scientism to consider them instead as a legally structured mechanism, located between political and economic processes, that play a constitutive role in capitalist societies. To that end, the project brings a deeper dimension to legal institutionalism by examining how contestation as a practice of critical engagement within and across legal, political and economic systems leads to novel understandings about remedies and ultimately shapes our social imaginaries of effective redress against labour violations and wrongs. CURE adopts a multi-dimensional, comparative and multi-method research design to generate a paradigm shift in how we analyse juridical concepts. It examines diachronically a set of emblematic labour rights representing the core dimensions of the employment relationship (i.e. employment status, equality, wage, dismissal and industrial action) across a set of distinct national systems (i.e. France, Greece, Poland, Sweden and the UK). Data collection and analysis includes legal and empirical (i.e. leximetric, computational and qualitative) methods specifically designed to capture and interpret internal (i.e. legal) and external (i.e. political and economic) perspectives on the regulation of the remedial framework at different distances. CURE will ultimately offer an interpretative map that will be robust enough to illuminate the crucial role of remedies in calibrating the effectiveness of labour law and determinative enough to provide significant guidance as per the evaluation and direction of existing regulatory frameworks and contribute in this way to the labour law discipline and labour policy-making and practice.
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